without increasing cost. Without this growing institutional and human capacity, OER will not be able to fulfil its transformative potential.
Thus, the challenge is to persuade people that making openness work productively requires financial investment, time and energy, but that these are justified by the wealth of positive outcomes that openness can generate. This is because deliberate openness acknowledges the following:
- Investment in designing effective educational environments is critically important to good education.
- A key to productive systems is to build on common intellectual capital, rather than duplicating similar efforts.
- All things being equal, collaboration will improve quality.
- As education is a contextualized practice, it is important to make it easy to adapt materials imported from different settings where this is required, and this should be encouraged rather than restricted.
It is unclear which direction educational systems will take. Will OER be co-opted as another in a long line of ultimately failed cost-cutting exercises? Or will it be harnessed as part of a strategy to invest more wisely and effectively in education, in the belief that producing intellectual leadership through free and open development and sharing of common intellectual capital is a worthwhile and socially essential activity for a healthy society?
With this in mind, the remainder of this section of the Guide focuses on presenting a set of practical guidelines for educational planners and decisionmakers on how to create environments that embrace the economic and educational possibilities of OER to create better quality teaching and learning environments.
The implications for educational planners and decision-makers
The key issues of relevance when considering the potential applications of OER can be summarized as follows:
- Educational systems and organizations that are serious about teaching and learning will need to ensure that spending on personnel and other related expenses reflects a sustained institutional or systemic effort to invest in creating more effective teaching and learning environments for their students. This will entail investment in developing and improving curricula, ongoing programme and course design, planning of contact sessions with students, development and procurement of quality teaching and learning materials, design of effective assessment activities and so on. Many educational systems and institutions do not yet make such investments in a planned and deliberate way, but it is an essential part of their core function.
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